Biography

John Harris was educated at the University of Kent and at Balliol College, Oxford, he is married to the multiple BAFTA, EMMY and Royal Television Society award winning Producer of Television Drama, Sita Williams, and they have a son, Jacob.

From March 30th 2004 to July 2011 John Harris was the joint Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Medical Ethics, the leading journal in medical and applied ethics. John Harris was elected a Fellow of the United Kingdom Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci) in 2001, the first philosopher to have been elected to Fellowship of this new National Academy, which was established to serve “the medical sciences in the same way as the Royal Society serves the natural sciences (and) the British Academy serves the humanities”. He was elected a Fellow of The Royal Society of Arts in 2006 of the Society of Biology in 2011 and is a Member of Academia Europaea (The Academy of Europe) 2011. He was one of the Founder Directors of the International Association of Bioethics and is a founder member of the Board of the Journal Bioethics and a member of the Editorial Board of the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics and many other journals. He frequently appears on radio and television both in the United Kingdom and overseas to discuss Biomedical Ethics, Medical Jurisprudence and related issues. He has acted as Ethical Consultant to national and international bodies and corporations including the European Parliament, The World Health Organisation, The European Commission, The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), The United Kingdom Department of Health, The Health Council of the Netherlands, The Research Council of Norway, The Welsh Office Of The United Kingdom, The British Fluoridation Society, Granada Television, Virgin Health Bank, Smithkline Beecham and GlaxoSmithkline. He is the founder and a General Editor of a major series of books for Oxford University Press entitled Issues in Biomedical Ethics and a new series of books which he co-edits with Sir John Sulston (Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine 2002) is published by Bloomsbury and entitled Science, Ethics and Society was launched in 2009.